Which brings us back to the estate system. Before, you would just expand as much as you could, and your great wealth would attract people to your realm in order to better help use and maintain it. Now, you need to do it the other way around, but it's not as easy to attract people with the *potential* of growth (and then long rebuilding times) and so most realms remain rather stagnant.
I agree completely. It seems that there are only 2 ways to solve this problem:
1. Revise the current estate issue, to allow less nobles to control more space.
2. Find 500 new players for the game.
